At thirty-two weeks in utero, babies

start dreaming. Sometimes during the collapse of

an iceberg you can see the dark blue colour

of its underside. 
Dreaming about WHAT. Iceland holds funeral

for the first glacier lost to climate change.

Visitors must be present to buy tickets.

Billionaires want to 
go to space because guillotines rely on

gravity to work. DREAMING ABOUT WHAT. Ice

churn, burning goo. Rinse, repeat. Remote control

white phosphorus and 
sea spray, another child vaporised on screen.

Evie asks me, Would you rather be a twig

or a piece of dust? Can I be a plastic

particle in the
Arctic snow? If we took the excess carbon

in the atmosphere and made one big diamond

it would be 3 billion cubic metres

or a cube the size 
of Everest. This is an advertisement

disguised as life advice. Would you rather hug

a koala or a quokka? Tilda asks.

Our planet’s poorly
equipped for delight. Your password must contain

an upper case letter, at least one number,

a gang sign, a haiku, a hieroglyph and

the pink blood of a 
unicorn. The boy’s scared of blue skies because

the drones don’t fly when the skies are grey. Elsewhere

the weather’s a xenomorph in a black dress.

While you’re watching bombs
are dropping. Under cloaks of diversity

and justice visuals. That dark wispy mass

floating above Sydney Harbour has fully

baffled the masses. 
I do not think, therefore I do not am. We

must snatch pleasure from the days to come. Was it

liquid metal, a dementor, pollution,

or just a scud cloud?
There are more hydrogen molecules in a

single molecule of water than there are

stars in the solar system. Are we not here

to fuck spiders? I
am dreaming my teeth out again. Government

as high corporation. To let us know your

feedback on genocide or the weird weather,

please consult this form. 
Blue-sky thinktank. Our AI team will get back

to you. Would you rather a tsunami or

a bushfire? asks Evie. At our next presser

will be blandishments 
on unrelated tissues. The same people

responsible for Robodebt will be re-

sponsible for a reactor. In this life

it’s not hard to die. 
Blue-sky blood clot. Tilda asks, Would you rather

swim in a pool of Nutella or maple

syrup? AI is now the ocean plastic

of the internet.
To make life is far more difficult. Would you

rather stumble across a panther in the

Blue Mountains or a thylacine near Cradle

Mountain? People watch 
people reacting to people streaming games.

Smoke from the burning Amazon rainforest

plunges São Paulo into darkness in the

middle of the day.
When male and female anglerfish mate, they melt

into one other, share bodies forever.

Overcome with emulsion, I’m going to work

until my bones turn 
to dust. The tiny variations in a

singer’s melodic conviction that increase

across the arc of a song. Would you rather

plague or famine? These
sapphics are so unsubtle. This meme wants

everyone to realise that Australia is

two mining companies, seven landlords and a

bunch of asbestos 
in a trench coat. Blue-sky drinking. Cuts against

the iambic grain of English with its fixed

pattern of falling stresses. Would your rather

eat yttrium or 
lanthanum? Oil-company simps, business hicks,

debate-club bedwetters. A line is a fuse that’s lit.

Selling off their grandchildren’s breathable air

to buy an under-
ground bunker to fuck their cousins in. Housing

bubble or bust. Next, an iceberg the size of

London breaks off the side of the Antarctic

ice shelf. The decline 
of the northern carbon sink. Just wait until

the stratospheric cloud shelf evaporates.

Maybe they’ll drink their teeth in their sleep.

Can we have some more
dragons in our climate predictions? Mortgage

originates from the old French dead pledge. My

children probably won’t be able to.

Would you rather work 
non-stop for the rest of your life or sleep out

your days? The line smoulders, the rhyme explodes. And

by a stanza a city is blown to bits.

I’m so tired of folks 
only talking about politics. I want

to talk about the trees. Blue-sky flooding.

Did you know that plants have photoreceptors

and can tell if you’re 
wearing a red or blue shirt? I don’t know, bruh,

that sounds like politics. Israeli settlers

are burning Palestinian olive trees.

‘Australia’ is 
an Enlightened blank space for colonial

experiments structured around a booming

land market. Nothing’s as precious as a hole

in the ground. Meanwhile 
invasive and bushfire-fuelling buffel grass

has overtaken ecosystems wholesale

in the continent’s centre. Would you rather

inherit a house 
or the planet? Would you rather drink algae

blooms or a toilet full of lava? My hair

is a mansion for nits, Evie yells. I buy

McHappy Meals and 
ask for the toys to be removed. They

include them anyway. In 2050

there’ll be more plastic than fish in the ocean.

Would you rather be 
in a zombie a robot apocalypse?

Raccoons are trying to break into Cybertrucks

because they’re literally confusing them

with dumpsters. Sewage
in Gaza laced with Polio. Chernobyl

wolves resisting cancer. Don’t forget to like

and subscribe to the dystopian beauty

of an oil rig. A
nurdle washed from my eyeball will soon join the

Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which viewed from space

is a nurdle. Say a prayer for the ether

which is obsolete. 
Leave the birdies to contend with dark matter.

Wobbly space-time explains the expansion of

the universe and galactic rotation.

Your capital eye.
Gravity has a history of being

a trickster. I is some other. So there’s no

point fretting that what we’re doing will cut ice.

Don’t feel constrained by 
the world limit. Strip a rhino of its porn.

Shit on a plate, charge a fall guy a fortune.

Thousands of lorikeets are unable. All

possibilities 
for meaning have been suspended or crushed. Now

poetry can only be barbaric, weird,

estranged from atrocity. Would you rather

be hellish or hold
out for heaven? I got the Blue Screen of Death.

What if dreams were real and life was fake? The sun’s

plasma clouds interject. I address my kids’

fair demands to the  
system, expecting the system to comply.

A pink-green glow sways like an iron curtain

to the south. Hail the earthworm rain. Every

precipitation
precipitates another. The long extinct

takahe lives. Techno-solutionism.

Their bodies appear perfectly spherical.

With blue-green plumage 
they look like a model planet Earth perched on

two spindly, bright red, windmilling legs. The

kids are alright, clambering across coal trains.

If you hacks can’t hack 
civil disobedience, I’d recommend

the Euthanasia Coaster. Private jets get

ready to leave for climate change conference

in Dubai, get stuck,
frozen on a runway in Munich. Now is

the winter of my kids’ disco tent. Zoo Snooze

is a riot. Lions escape. Instead of

this old world ending 
catastrophically, what if one by one we

got sleepier and sleepier until it

gently stopped. Don’t say bedtime, say fuck the cops.

Campus encampments  
our last resort. Would you rather never fly

in a plane or never swim in the ocean

again? The water in your body is just

visiting. I was 
a thunderstorm the week before last. I will be

the ocean soon. Verify you are human.

Most of your cells come and go like morning dew.

Black mayonnaise dredged 
from the depths of canals. We are more weather

pattern than stone monument. Green sunlight on

mist. Summer lightning. Would you rather dream in

Adriatic or 
amniotic fluid? Fuck around, find out.

Your choices outweigh your substance. The child who

is not embraced by the village will burn it

down to feel its warmth.












Note: ‘Thermal Runaway’ mines various social media feeds, appropriating,

for instance, Elias Greig’s tweet, ‘AI is already the ocean plastic of the

internet’, among others, while quoting phrases from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s

poems ‘To Sergei Esenin’ and ‘A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes

about Poetry’ (both 1926, and the translations are my own), and a line

from the Midnight Oil song ‘Blue Sky Mine’ (1990). The poem ends with

a proverb purportedly of African origin.